The present invention relates to data protection for applications on mobile electronic devices.
A mobile electronic device will typically include a number of applications for performing various functions on the device. These applications may store sensitive data on the memory of the device. A mobile electronic device may also include a memory cleaning mechanism through which memory on the device is periodically cleaned. However, the memory cleaning mechanism may not be aware of sensitive data stored by various applications on the device, and thus may not clean the memory of sensitive data that it would be desirable to remove from the device for data protection reasons. Protection of sensitive application data is particularly a concern in respect of software applications that are developed for the mobile electronic device by third parties other than the provider of the base operating system and/or virtual machine software used by the mobile electronic device.
Thus, a method and system of memory management for applications that assists the memory cleaning mechanism in cleaning sensitive data associated with applications is desired.